The Empowered Employee is Coming; Is The World Ready?By John Hagel, Suketu Gandhi , Giovanni Rodriguez |
|
In November 1993 – as the nation was just about to learn about a new thing called the World Wide Web – Time magazine did a head-shot cover honoring a rather unusual subject. The cover story, “The New Face of America,”examined the huge demographic shifts that social scientists were predicting for the U.S. The future was one that belonged to women, people of color and other groups – from foreign places – not previously featured in the story of the American dream. But how do you give life to the heroine of this story? If you are Time, you put her on the cover. But as the special issue illustrated, the new face of America was largely a composite view, so the face on the cover had to be a composite, too. It was Time’s first cover to use a computer-generated image of a human being.
Looking back on this story today – an aspirational story, aided by technology – is especially poignant. Already the nation was coming to grips with the reality that its people would change. But who in late 1993 – just months after the launch of the Mosaic Web browser, and just a year before Netscape – could have foreseen the role that digital would play in making the new face a reality? It would take a full generation of experimentation, wins and failures before the idea of human empowerment – for anyone, let alone women and ethnic minorities – could become real. Web 2.0 – the second generation — picked up this theme when the tools of production became widely distributed enough to enable people to empower themselves.
Read more from the Forbes article.
Learn more about the authors:
John Hagel
Co-chairman, Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge
Suketu Gandhi
Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Giovanni Rodriguez
Specialist Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP
